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I?’ said Daisy.
    ‘I got chummy and then appealed to his pride,’ I said. ‘And I’ve promised him a ten-pound tip.’ I had done no such thing, had only just thought of it there and then, but I felt Cadwallader needed to make some reparation for his outburst.
    ‘We’ll call it twenty,’ said Cadwallader. ‘Another Manhattan before dinner? I would advise it – Mrs Murdoch is a good plain cook with lots of plain.’
    ‘Ugh,’ I said, goose pimples rising at the very suggestion. ‘Nothing with whisky for me, darling, please.’
    ‘All right, then, a Sidecar,’ said Cadwallader. ‘But don’t let them hear you tomorrow, Dandy. About the whisky, I mean. This town runs on the stuff.’

Chapter Two
    It did indeed. One could not help thinking that the various reverends were wasting their time rather, pushing Temperance, in a town where most of the inhabitants who did not fish or farm or shop-keep worked for the whisky distiller who had an enormous bottling hall and bonded store a stone’s throw up the hill from the High Street. From what I understood, moreover, since the Ferry Fair day was a holiday, many of the workers would be quite a bit more sober this day than most others, it being their practice not to filch the whisky in bottles or flasks but simply to glug it down during their shift, then stagger home and sleep it off. As well as ‘the bottling’, of course, there was the usual, more than generous, quota of pubs. A town the size of South Queensferry in Wiltshire, say, would boast a coaching inn and perhaps a backstreet beer shop, but here there were upwards of a dozen separate establishments selling the demon drink, from the Hawes Inn at the top, drawing its respectability from History and Literature and its trade from the ferryboat trippers come to look at the bridge, all the way to the drinking shops such as ‘Broon’s Bar’ at the bottom. The even less salubrious-sounding ‘Hole i’ the Wa’’ had recently fallen down, suggesting that its name perhaps had referred to its architecture as much as its social standing.
    Cadwallader regaled us with all of this as we motored into town the next morning, and seemed heartily in favour both of the distillery men topping themselves up as they worked and of the ratio of beer pumps to head of population.
    ‘Because when you’ve just been through what we’ve just been through . . .’ he said grimly.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Buttercup. ‘I thought Prohibition was rather fun. You didn’t have to worry too much at home so long as you chose your servants carefully, and the speakeasies were really quite jolly.’
    Cadwallader shook his head at her as he stopped to let a crowd of tattered little children cross the road at Dalmeny village.
    ‘For God’s sake, Freddy, don’t start singing the praises of speakeasies in front of anyone today, will you?’ he said, waving and tooting at the children as we started up again. ‘Off to see the Burry Man?’ he called.
    ‘It’s hardly likely to come up in conversation,’ said Buttercup. ‘I must say, though, gangsters are much better value at a party than our new neighbours showed themselves to be last night, aren’t they, Cad?’
    Cadwallader tried to laugh this off as ‘Freddy’s nonsense’ and although she protested – ‘Well, what would you call him, darling? He always brings a case of gin and one never sees him without those two boys who look like boxers!’ – Daisy and I thought it best to feign deafness.
    Within minutes, we arrived at the parking yard of the garage by the Hawes and stepped down. It was a fine morning, a clear sky and just the merest flutter of a breeze from the river and Daisy, Buttercup and I debated together whether to take our little coats and our sun parasols, or both, or neither.
    ‘Only I do hate putting on a coat and crumpling my frock sleeves then taking it off later when it’s hot,’ said Daisy. ‘I’d rather feel cold until this afternoon and keep my pleats